I’ve had some trouble with the highly praised work of the young Danish artist Jesper Just. Much has been made of the high production values in his films. I’ve noted them too, and found them conspicuously high, which can be a turn-off.

People speak of his smart use of Hollywood noir clichés, though the only consistent connection seems to be that he films in moody black and white. His plots, or situations, have often revolved around same-sex male love. But with their Cole Porter and disco soundtracks and man-that-got-away nostalgia, the results feel retro in a way that knowingness doesn’t redeem. The effect is queer eye for a straight audience, and we don’t need any more of that.

I rethought my reactions after seeing Mr. Just’s most recent film, “A Vicious Undertow”(2007), partly because I saw it after Ingmar Bergman’s death. In the context of revisiting Bergman’s films, Mr. Just’s work — its sources, its dreamlike structures, even its awkwardness — made sense.

“A Vicious Undertow,” 10 minutes long, was shot in Copenhagen. The opening setting, atmospherically lighted, is an ornamental bar-lounge dripping chinoiserie. There are three characters: a middle-aged woman, a younger woman and a youngish man (the Danish actor Johannes Lilleore, a Just regular).

Like all of Mr. Just’s films, this one is more or less plotless. It’s essentially an extended dance, a pas de trois that shifts to a solo. The older woman meets the younger woman; they exchange looks, then dance. The man cuts in and claims the younger woman as partner.

The older woman at this point magically steps out of the bar, as if out of a film set, and we follow her as she climbs a staircase that circles the exterior of a towerlike building. It’s as if she is ascending a whirlpool rather than being pulled down into one, but her mood is unclear: Distraught? Exultant? She reaches the top of the tower and turns to look down at the nocturnal city. We wonder if she will jump. The film ends.

If this is Hollywood — Hitchcock, say — it is Hollywood filtered through Sven Nykvist-style chiaroscuro (which itself had film noir roots). The erotic interaction between the women, the younger of whom suggests in some shots a crossed-dressed man, brings Bergman films like “The Silence” and “Persona” to mind, with their enigmatic attractions, repulsions and fusions.

In a similar way, certain earlier Just films, like “The Lonely Villa” (2004), recall “Wild Strawberries,” with its melodramatic yearnings for a lost past leavened with daffy, surreal humor.

Whether Mr. Just has any of these sources in mind, I don’t know. The frame of reference may be entirely mine. In any case, “A Vicious Undertow” is enhanced by one of his best scores (an orchestration of the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin”), some marvelous circling camera work à la Max Ophuls and a narrative that feels suggestively logical without being in any way specific or resolved.

I would be interested to see what Mr. Just would do with a full-length film. A while back I might have predicted something Bergmanesque in a bad way: arty and obfuscating. Now I think otherwise.

The work of the young French painter Marlène Mocquet may be something of a guilty pleasure, but what good is taste if it doesn’t betray you? Working very small, on raw canvas, Ms. Mocquet treads lightly on a twisting trail that winds from Redon to August Strindberg, then to Miró, Klee and Tanguy, and ends up near Sempé, Edward Koren and Saul Steinberg. Additionally, she exploits paint’s possibilities with flair, working thick, then thin, dripping, pouring and staining. She also has a wonderful feeling for jewel-like colors.

Ms. Mocquet is a lapsed Symbolist who has as much faith in paint as in the wildness of the imagination. In “The Bird Fingered Hand” a rosy-fingered hand, one of its six digits equipped with a beak and an eye, descends from the heavens to pluck a wave from the thick ocean of white and green roiling below. But the bird-finger lunges avidly toward a droplet: breakfast trumps God-like gestures.

In “King Kong,” the ape is a big patch of crackled brown paint whose paw is delicately tinged with white, the color of Fay Wray’s gown. And in “The Hunter,” the green protagonist has ignited a prismatic explosion, launching many tiny creatures into the air and singeing himself in the process; the object of his sport, a rabbit of scumbled pink and white, looks on, clearly pleased.

This is a cool, materially buoyant summer show with a dark chaser. About half the work is sculptural, in the way sculpture is now defined, as all but inseparable from other forms. A hinged panel piece by Shane Aslan Selzer adheres to a traditional free-standing folding-screen model, though its decorative implications are belied by its materials: a stainless-steel framework filled with stretched sheets of fire-repellent “emergency foil.”

Amy Yao’s approach is also accumulative. She lines up several spare sculptural elements, sometimes paired, along a wall: a half-painted dowel, a broken clock, a hank of fake hair, sheets of glass pinning a torn piece of newspaper in place. The results are like a free-associative poem that can be read in either direction.

The back gallery is entirely given over to David Benjamin Sherry’s tenebrous photographs, some Goth-spooky; others with luminous splintered patterns, like mandalas; still others dramatizing a twilight-zone eroticism. We’ve seen work like this before, but not quite like it, a huge distinction these days. HOLLAND COTTER

In a city of museums fully stocked with old master paintings, why should anyone care to see lesser ones in a contemporary-art gallery? Because viewing a Brueghel next to a Holbein is one thing; alongside a Karen Kilimnik and a John Currin, something else.

This is hardly the first generation of figurative painters to “discover” the old masters. But where Picasso mined Velázquez, and de Kooning looked to Rembrandt and Rubens — mostly to resolve issues of space and composition — the contemporary painters in “Old School” are interested in what might be called the proto-Surrealist sensibility of art that explored fear, desire and fantasy centuries before Freud.

Anj Smith’s dark miniature with sinister monkeys, Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s figure-packed battle scene enacted under a table and Hilary Harkness’s leggy vixens shipwrecked on a tropical beach all work alongside the Brueghels. (Jan Brueghel the Elder’s “Panoramic Landscape With Travelers,” with a large animal skeleton dominating its foreground, and Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s more sedate “Peasant Wedding Procession.”)

In the landscape arena, Djordje Ozbolt’s tooth-achingly bright vista pairs well with a hallucinatory version of “The Temptation of St. Anthony in a Landscape” by Jacob van Swanenburgh, as do anesthetized pastorals by Christopher Orr and the 16th-century painter Battista Dossi.

A painting attributed to the School of Caravaggio serves as a reasonable springboard for grotesque still-life reinterpretations by Glenn Brown and Mr. Currin. Portraits by Elizabeth Peyton, Wilhelm Sasnal, Michaël Borremans and Julie Heffernan complement Lucas Cranach, Caesar Boëtius van Everdingen and Jan van Noordt. (Ms. Kilminik’s “Satan as a Knight” doesn’t really count as a “portrait.” Its homage-to-irony ratio is consistent, however, with the tenor of this show.)

What is missing from “Old School” is the art history. Old master paintings aren’t just pictures, after all. They are religious tracts, sermons on morality and proofs of social status. In this context they are valued more for their wealth of weirdness and what they can teach a painter about creating mood, aura and ambience. But if you want art history, the Frick is only a block away.

MARTHA SCHWENDENER

Correction: August 23, 2007

An art review on Aug. 10 of “A Vicious Undertow,” a film by Jesper Just at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery, referred incorrectly to another filmmaker whose camera work was similar. He is Max Ophuls, not his son, Marcel Ophuls, a documentary maker.